In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder and the celebration of it by so-called progressive liberals, Dr Eric Weinstein has said that revolutionary thinking has become normalised. The Harvard mathematician joins Piers Morgan for an insightful discussion on strategic silence, free speech, platforming, morality and the power of ‘mustn’t’.
Transcript
00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: You have this group of people, particularly people, let’s say, in their 20s now, who’ve not been invited into the party of Western civilization. They are not being given the means to have babies, uh, a mortgage, to participate in a profound way, and they’re being asked to conserve a society that is more or less using them as a protein source. You mustn’t celebrate Charlie Kirk’s murder. It’s an absolute. It’s not a legal requirement that you not celebrate it. Come on, man. W- have you lost your mind? Have you lost your humanity? This show isn’t as important enough to me that I want to endanger my family and myself playing these games. We know what morality is. We know that this is far outside it, and if you wanna play with those people because you think that those are interesting ideas, that’s up to you. I’m not gonna interfere with your free speech. I’m not your gatekeeper, and it’s-
00:00:52
Piers Morgan: Eric, Eric, one word I will repeat, which I would love to have answered next time, which is who? Who are you talking about? In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Dr. Eric Weinstein wrote, “Revolutionaries have been normalized as if they’re liberals. They’re not.” That normalization, he says, is the fault of the media, the education system, and perhaps the Democratic Party. A lot has been said and written about whether this violence and division are a left-wing problem, a right-wing problem, or just an internet problem. Dr. Weinstein joins me now to talk through his thinking on this subject and more. Eric, great to have you back on Uncensored.
00:01:27
Eric Weinstein: Piers, good to be with you.
00:01:29
Piers Morgan: Uh, just explain to me what your overview is about where we find ourselves post the Charlie Kirk, uh, murder.
00:01:40
Eric Weinstein: It’s an interesting, uh, interesting spot. Um, I guess from my perspective, it’s been fairly clear to me that we’ve been aggressively normalizing revolutionary thinking, and we don’t recognize it when we see it. So as a result, you have, uh, decided that you’ve created people who I don’t really think exist. You might call them the woke or progressives.
00:02:02
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:02:02
Eric Weinstein: But coming from a relatively progressive left-of-center family myself, we used to recognize these people as revolutionaries. And, and you, you’ll see them by their empathy. Their empathy is entirely shifted. So if you’ve seen any of the interviews of random college students asked about, uh, Charlie Kirk’s murder and they’re smirking or they’re happy or they’re making jokes-
00:02:25
Piers Morgan: Yeah, it’s been really shocking
00:02:26
Eric Weinstein: … what you’re seeing is… Well, that’s the odd part. It, it’s not really shocking at all. You just don’t realize what you’ve been looking at.
00:02:34
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:02:35
Eric Weinstein: Revolutionaries have a shifted empathy complex. They’re at war. They’re at war with the system in which they embed, and the, the nurses administering your IV, the person making your coffee, the, um, person at the DMV processing your driver’s license, uh, is someone who is often completely unsympathetic with the society in which you exist and who would ask for its overthrow, potentially with violence, and, and, and often violence is to be celebrated. So, you know, there are, there’s language around this called direct action, and I just have this feeling that effectively Americans haven’t been, I don’t know, in contact with revolutionary thinking enough to understand that it’s an entirely shifted empathy complex.
00:03:27
Piers Morgan: But i- is it almost worse than that? Uh, you know, if they were genuine revolutionaries, then perhaps I would subscribe to that theory. Um, I, I also think a lot of them have been contaminated by the constant refrain that, uh, Trump’s Adolf Hitler, that his supporters are Nazis, they’re all a bunch of fascists. That if you are a bit of an unhinged young brain and you keep hearing that repeatedly and you see it all over your TikTok and everything else, that eventually you sort of see it almost as a civic duty to defend your nation against these Nazis. I think that’s part of the problem. But I also-
00:04:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but-
00:04:02
Piers Morgan: But I also felt with… I’ll, I’ll, I’ll come to that as well in a moment, but just on that point you make about empathy, when I watch those clips, th- these weren’t just, like, just young people being stupid, ’cause you kind of, you could kind of explain that. But I saw, you know, teachers, university professors, doctors, all posting stuff gleefully celebrating the cold-blooded execution of a young man with a wife and two kids who were there, and that, that was something more than just, you know, a lack of empathy. And I don’t think it was linked to them seeing themselves as great revolutionaries. It was just an absolute disconnect from normal human reaction. I mean, I’ve, I, I’ve actually interviewed genuine medically diagnosed psychopaths who are medically, you know, deemed to be incapable of feeling empathy, guilt, and so on. But these, these people aren’t in that category. What has happened to them to make them so completely detached from the reality of what they’re doing?
00:05:08
Eric Weinstein: I, I’m myself mystified by the mystification. You know, so l- I don’t know even how to t- talk about this, Piers.
00:05:18
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:05:18
Eric Weinstein: These people are not in a medical state. They have, they have loaded a revolutionary program. And, you know, when, when a… Let’s say when America went to war against Germany and Japan, uh, we used phrases like the Jerries and the Japs. And we wrote, uh, messages on munitions that we, uh, used to kill the enemy.
00:05:44
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:05:45
Eric Weinstein: This, this is what they’re doing. They’re writing on bullets a- and casings. They are doing message killing, and the odd part about it is we don’t recognize that they are at war. Now, you, you make the point that they’re not real revolutionaries, and this has to do with the fact- That, um, let, let, let’s say a nurse who administers, uh, anesthesia and IVs, somebody with real control over your life, becomes a revolutionary. He may have a perfectly nice life as a nurse, and he doesn’t, he’s not eager to die. However, the program that has been loaded, um, is, is exactly this program. The first thing you do is you paint the target. So notice the following words. Fascist, reactionary, Zionist, Nazi. As soon as you see someone painted with those terms, the empathy complex changes. Uh, tell me something. Um, y- have you ever had really good lamb?
00:06:46
Piers Morgan: Yes. Many times.
00:06:48
Eric Weinstein: Or, or v- or, or veal.
00:06:50
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:06:51
Eric Weinstein: If you think about what lamb and veal are-
00:06:54
Piers Morgan: Mm-hmm
00:06:55
Eric Weinstein: … it’s one of the most upsetting concepts, but you’re given language, which is, “I’ll have the lamb.” “No, I’ll have the veal.”
00:07:02
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:07:02
Eric Weinstein: And you don’t actually think about what it means. And so what I’m claiming is, is that when you hear somebody talking about, “Oh, I’m fighting reactionaries, I’m fight- I’m fighting the Zios. Uh-
00:07:12
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:07:12
Eric Weinstein: … punch a Nazi, that guy’s a reactionary, far right,” that is the language used to paint the enemy so that you don’t need to feel bad about the enemy-
00:07:23
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:07:23
Eric Weinstein: … dying or, or getting hurt. You can celebrate this. And th- this issue of message killing is something I’ve been talking about for a long time. If you have something like the AP style guide and it says we can’t print, uh, manifestos of killers anymore, um, the public doesn’t know that there’s an entire theory or a doctrine called strategic silence.
00:07:45
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:07:46
Eric Weinstein: So they’re sitting there watching their news, trying to figure out, “Well, what’s the motive?” And the motive that comes through the AP style guide would be, might be something like, uh, the mass, the alleged mass killer, uh, is reputed to have shouted a foreign religious slogan in another language. And you’re thinking, “Oh, come on. Y- y- you know, you, you can’t even report on what happened.” So that gives the illusion of a cover-up, because what’s going on is, is that the news organizations have been pre-programmed as to how they can report on this. So you have a situation in which we have a group called the woke that don’t really exist, or the progressives, which are actually normalized revolutionaries, particularly in, within the, the Democratic Party. My party has normalized revolutionaries inside the party. There are normalized revolutionaries in the other party, the Republicans, much more around Christian nationalism and Christian identity. And you’re now playing this game where we’re undoing a tolerant, liberal society where the only people with real ideas are these fringe individuals. Let me just make a point that people aren’t going to have thought much about. The normalized revolutionaries inside the Democratic Repa- uh, Party have ideas. AOC has ideas. Mamdani has ideas. Hillary Clinton does not have high ideas. You, you have this group of people, uh, particularly people, let’s say, in their 20s now, who’ve not been invited into the party, um, of Western civilization. They are not being given the means to have babies, uh, a mortgage, to participate in a profound way, and they’re being asked to conserve a society that is more or less using them as a protein source. And, and as a result, um, the real problem is that the two parties, the centers of the two parties in the US don’t have i- ideas. They have no offerings. They’ve got revolutionaries. They’re playing with revolutionaries. The revolutionaries are getting normalized. There’s an entire shift in empathy complex. People, let’s say, 40 to 15, um, which you saw around the Charlie Kirk thing.
00:10:02
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:10:02
Eric Weinstein: You… We’re having a discussion about it as if it’s an individual mental health crisis. It isn’t. This is one of the things that the human mind can be trained to do if it goes to war, which is it can’t over-sympathize with the, with the enemy.
00:10:15
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:10:16
Eric Weinstein: And these people are very much at war with the society that houses them. It, it’s, if I can make an analogy, uh, at some point the Gulf Cartel in Mexico hired the Zetas from Mexican Special Forces as their muscle.
00:10:30
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:10:30
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, I just gave an interview with, uh, the A16Z podcast where I said Antifa is, in many ways, the armed wing of the Democratic Party-
00:10:38
Piers Morgan: Right
00:10:38
Eric Weinstein: … and I’m talking about my party.
00:10:41
Piers Morgan: Yeah. I completely agree. So what, what’s the answer? ‘Cause I, I’ve got a new book coming out called Woke Is Dead. I, I say in that I don’t think it’s actually dead yet, but I do feel that the ideology was given a, a sort of spectacular repudiation when Trump got reelected, that a lot of people looked at the way the Democrats, in particular, had gone down this progressive woke left path leading to the kind of insanity of promoting trans athletes in women’s sport and so on, and they realized they kind of lost all ability to sound like they understood basic common sense. Um, and therefore, if we d- as a society, we sort of come through years of this, and I think most people now instinctively recoil against a lot of that woke ideology, therefore the ideology is dying. D- do you agree with that? And, uh, if not, what is the solution?
00:11:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I don’t agree with this at all. First of all, I don’t think there was woke ideology. I think that’s the name we gave to revolutionary ideology.
00:11:44
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:11:44
Eric Weinstein: A revolutionary ideology doesn’t die quite so quickly. I think people are just waking up to what an actual ri- what a rifle is. I think people have the idea, well, 100 yards sounds like very far away.
00:11:56
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:11:57
Eric Weinstein: Uh, and if you talk to anybody who knows their way around an AR-15, um, they’ll be- It, it’s a long time before you have to start taking in Coriolis forces-
00:12:06
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:12:06
Eric Weinstein: … and wind, wind conditions.
00:12:07
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:12:08
Eric Weinstein: I, I, I think people have no idea what Pandora’s box they’ve opened. And, and Piers, if I could just bring it back to this program. As you know-
00:12:17
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:12:17
Eric Weinstein: … I very much enjoy doing this program, but principally, I, I insist that it’s you and me in one-on-one. And why is that? It’s because this program also is normalizing the most insane voices. If you think about it, you’re very capable of having a terrific one-on-one discussion, but you’re also at the same time playing with people who are completely unhinged in a sort of Jerry Springerization of, uh, the discussion of our problems. Some of those people that you have on are revolutionaries. They’re not actually normal guests.
00:12:48
Piers Morgan: Who are you, who are you talking about?
00:12:49
Eric Weinstein: And that revolutionary empathy-
00:12:50
Piers Morgan: Well, who, who are you talking about?
00:12:54
Eric Weinstein: I’m, I’m not gonna get into it. Uh-
00:12:55
Piers Morgan: Well, you gotta, you gotta say-
00:12:56
Eric Weinstein: I don’t want these people coming to my-
00:12:56
Piers Morgan: You gotta give an example of what your… You gotta give an example, surely.
00:13:02
Eric Weinstein: I have no problem giving an example. I’m trying to tell you about what my issue is, is that they come to my house. They publish my address. What you’re talking about is inviting people who have absolutely no regard for life, for family, for even normal politics. And what I’m trying to d- what I’m trying to say is we don’t understand who we’ve opened the door to. If you look at all of those videos asking for Charlie Kirk reactions, do you imagine you’re looking at thousands upon thousands of mental illness cases? No. You’re looking at an ideology that you can’t kill so easily. And in fact, you know, I ran a poll recently, um, on Twitter. Are there illiberal ideas that cannot be reversed by liberal, uh, measures alone? The more you open the door to this insanity of trans athletes and, uh, you know, cross-dressers in, uh, in, in charge of our nuclear- spent nuclear material, all this kind of stuff, the more you’re gonna have an illiberal reaction in the form of Donald Trump, MAGA, and the hardliners in the Republican Party, who are going to say that we cannot afford, uh, to keep this door open to, uh, normalized madness. And so, you know, I, I would love to have a discussion about it, but quite frankly, these people are scary dangerous. I have not had a podcast for five years, in part because of the increased threat coming from recognized revolutionary behavior.
00:14:30
Piers Morgan: I mean, you, you said recently, you wrote actually, “When it comes to speech, there is shouldn’t, brackets bad; mustn’t, unthinkable; can’t, illegal. If broadly celebrating political murder of national figures is merely shouldn’t, we will all end up with can’t. Free speech is all about mustn’t. We bet all of society on mustn’t.” What exactly did you mean by that?
00:14:55
Eric Weinstein: Now, thank you for bringing that up, really appreciate the opportunity. You mustn’t burn the flag. It’s not that you can’t. It shouldn’t be illegal to burn the flag. And it’s not that you really shouldn’t because it’s a bad thing to do. It should be unthinkable. And I wanna live in a country in which I have every right to burn my flag, and it never once occurs to me during a normal life that that would be a thing that I would even consider doing. There’s this concept of mustn’t, which is cultural, which is what stops very dangerous fit ideas. You see, the fitness of an idea is, determines how easily it spreads. You can have a bad idea that’s fit just the way a virus is fit in an evolutionary sense. And so what we’re really looking for is we’re looking for very strong cultural prohibitions that leave us a free people with every legal right to express ourselves. What you’re starting to see is that the violation of mustn’t, there’s no concept of mustn’t. You mustn’t celebrate Charlie Kirk’s murder. It’s an absolute. It’s, it’s not a, it’s not a, it’s not a legal requirement that you not celebrate it. It’s like, come on, man. What… Have you lost your mind? Have you lost your humanity? And that is increasingly seen as funny or quaint.
00:16:16
Piers Morgan: Right. But how… So, so look, just g- coming back to what you said about this show and who we platform and stuff. You know, I have people who react to me platforming you, right, who say you’re a dangerous extremist and so on. You, you’ve heard that yourself many times, I’m sure. I don’t view you as either dangerous-
00:16:33
Eric Weinstein: No, I haven’t heard, I haven’t, I haven’t heard that I’m a dam-
00:16:36
Piers Morgan: Well, I-
00:16:36
Eric Weinstein: I haven’t heard that I’m a dangerous extremist
00:16:37
Piers Morgan: … I, I, I, look, I, I don’t, I don’t put, think that about you for a moment, but I’m curious who you think we’ve platformed who would fit, fit that category that you’re discussing, and whether you think that-
00:16:49
Eric Weinstein: But you just repeated something, which I don’t…
00:16:53
Piers Morgan: Well, I’m just talking about random pe-
00:16:54
Eric Weinstein: Piers, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that I’m a dangerous-
00:16:55
Piers Morgan: I’m talking about random people on social media. I, I’m not talking about ma- a mainstream voice. I’m talking about random people commenting when we do stuff. There’s always a few that pop up who think you’re a lunatic, right? I… As there are with everyone I talk to. I could interview Mother Teresa, there’d be people calling her a-
00:17:09
Eric Weinstein: Piers
00:17:09
Piers Morgan: … dangerous lunatic.
00:17:10
Eric Weinstein: Piers, for God’s sake, for God’s sake, man, I’m a Harvard PhD with an MIT postdoc. I’ve been, uh, funded by Soros and Thiel. Nobody really thinks that I’m stupid. Nobody thinks that I’m a dangerous lunatic. Nobody really thinks that I’m far left or far right. There’s a bunch of morons on the internet.
00:17:30
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:17:30
Eric Weinstein: And if you wanna decide that they have a voice, then I’m sure that some of them think I’m a robot, some of them think I’m a hologram, and some of them think that I’m a, a-
00:17:38
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:17:38
Eric Weinstein: … a space alien. Uh, i- if you decide that you’re gonna open the discussion to those voices, I’ll go get a sandwich. Uh, you’re not a dangerous lunatic.
00:17:46
Piers Morgan: No, no, no, that’s not the point I’m making.
00:17:47
Eric Weinstein: I’m not a dangerous lunatic.
00:17:48
Piers Morgan: The point, the point I’m ma- No, no. You-
00:17:49
Eric Weinstein: No
00:17:49
Piers Morgan: … I think you’re missing my point. I’ve got no problem with you saying what you said about some of the people we platform. I’m just curious who these people are that you think I shouldn’t be platforming. Because without saying who they are, it’s very hard for me to-
00:18:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, why-
00:18:01
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00:20:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, but Piers, why would I want to repeat anyone’s name who has this characteristic and profile? In other words, what I’m telling you is we’ve got a country that is wall-to-wall stocked with high-powered rifles-
00:20:20
Piers Morgan: Yeah
00:20:20
Eric Weinstein: … that allow very far shots to be made relatively easily, and you’re talking about the fact that woke is over. No, no. There are going to be revolutionaries at various levels throughout your life. You’ll never get rid of them. They are never going away. And what we’re talking about is we’re talking about not inviting them into our lives. Every time you ask for, “What are the names? What are the specifics? Get into it,” I will tell you, why invite that person to a bigger audience? Why invite that person to paint more targets with words like reactionary, Nazi, Zionist?
00:20:57
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:20:58
Eric Weinstein: All of these things, alt-right, far right, that stuff is going to get more and more people killed. So I would prefer that we talk about this in general, which is anybody with wildly and radically shifted empathy. You’ll see somebody smiling when they’re trying to destroy another person’s character.
00:21:18
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:21:18
Eric Weinstein: You know? You’ll s- you’ll see a different shift in, in, in the basic notion of what makes someone happy. You’ll, you’ll see people who are far more concerned with people they’ve never met than their own family members or even their own life. If, if, if you wanna think about this in a positive way, for example, you could remember the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that went to the civil war involving Franco in Spain. Those were Americans who, for whatever reason, decided that they were so ideologically committed that they were willing to give their own lives in a foreign war that no one was drafting them to fight. I, I’m telling you that you just… You have to understand that there’s an archetype, which is the revolutionary-
00:21:57
Piers Morgan: I understand that
00:21:57
Eric Weinstein: … and the revolutionary-
00:21:58
Piers Morgan: I understand it, but people-
00:21:59
Eric Weinstein: Is-
00:21:59
Piers Morgan: But people would say, okay, but Eric-
00:22:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:22:00
Piers Morgan: … people would say about you, you know, some people say this about you, that you are, you operate-
00:22:05
Eric Weinstein: Well-
00:22:06
Piers Morgan: … outside of mainstream thinking about a lot of things, right? Maybe you… And I’m sure you would be quite happy to concede that and, and so yeah, you do. But people will say that, and they’ll say, “Well, I shouldn’t be platforming you for that reason.” So my question really, I’m not… You know, obviously it’s difficult to know who you’re talking about if you don’t say who it is.
00:22:24
Eric Weinstein: I’m confused.
00:22:24
Piers Morgan: But my point is, who is the arbiter of who should not be platformed? Who is the person who decides whether this person or that person is, you know, not worthy of being platformed or sh- or should be under the category of mustn’t, as, as you put it in that, in that paragraph that, that I read out. You know, who is the arbiter of this stuff? Is it you, who some people consider out in, out there yourself? Is it somebody else? Is there some, is there some kind of papal figure we have-
00:22:53
Eric Weinstein: Are, are, are we that confused-
00:22:53
Piers Morgan: … for determining our booking price?
00:22:57
Eric Weinstein: Piers, are we that con… Piers, are we that confused? I mean, look, if somebody starts talking, uh, uh, about the need to, to, uh, murder little children-
00:23:06
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:23:06
Eric Weinstein: … let’s say, you know, are we, are we gonna pretend that that person, uh, is potentially as outrageous as somebody who talks about the fact that maybe our taxes need to be a little bit lower than somebody-
00:23:17
Piers Morgan: No, but let me give you an example
00:23:18
Eric Weinstein: … considers that-
00:23:18
Piers Morgan: Let me give you an example. I, I have people on who are-
00:23:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:23:21
Piers Morgan: … extremely, extremely Zionist, okay, in their thinking. And they come on, and they can often talk in a way that many people find grotesquely offensive about what the Israeli government has been-
00:23:33
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm
00:23:33
Piers Morgan: … doing in Gaza and so on. Now, many people on the-
00:23:37
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:23:37
Piers Morgan: … pro-Palestinian side would say, I, I… It’s appalling that I platform these inhuman, callous people who speak in such a language. If I had someone like Smotrich or Ben-Gvir on from the Israeli government and they started talking casually about ethnically cleansing Palestinians and so on. You know, so the question becomes, again, for me, I’ve got no problem with you critiquing the show. But the complexity comes for me if you don’t say who you’re talking about, because actually I have a lot of guests on- … that people say I shouldn’t platform. And often it’s because their own personal positioning says that that person’s dangerous.
00:24:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:24:11
Piers Morgan: That person’s an extremist. What they really mean is, they, they challenge what I’m thinking. Uh, the individuals who are complaining. And I don’t think, you know, the whole point of my show is I tend to bring people on who do disagree with each other, and do challenge each other. And I do one-on-ones, but I also, as you know, do, do occasional panels.
00:24:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:24:30
Piers Morgan: And I see no problem with that.
00:24:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:24:32
Piers Morgan: But, but you, you seem to be kind of having an all-encompassing critique of the show without being specific, which means difficult for me. Because I would love to debate an individual booking we’ve had that you’re particularly-
00:24:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sure
00:24:43
Piers Morgan: … incensed about, because then I can make a more-
00:24:46
Eric Weinstein: But what I’m trying to say to you
00:24:46
Piers Morgan: … a sort of more clear-eyed view. But I’m curious who-
00:24:48
Eric Weinstein: It appears I’m not trying… Yeah.
00:24:51
Piers Morgan: You see what I mean?
00:24:51
Eric Weinstein: I’m not trying to get anyone… Yeah, but I’m trying not… I’m, I am not ever, I promise you this on-air, ever going to try to send dangerous people to the home of one of your guests-
00:25:03
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:25:03
Eric Weinstein: … to terrorize them after the show.
00:25:05
Piers Morgan: Right.
00:25:06
Eric Weinstein: Right? In other words, what you’re talking about largely stays on the show. So the first cut, just the, the easiest cut to make here, is that a lot of the, these people are playing off of the internet. It’s not just a question of trading tweets or trading ideas-
00:25:21
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:25:21
Eric Weinstein: … or, or trading accusations. It’s a question of, uh, how can I endanger this person in their personal life? It’s a, it’s a, it’s a full game that is nonstop. You know, I, I, I have a stalking mob that’s been coming after me for years.
00:25:36
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:25:37
Eric Weinstein: And it’s like, who are they? Well, what do they want? Well, shut up. D- I, why do I wanna talk about these people in specific? The n- the next point that I’m tr- gonna try to make is, if you have somebody who’s supposedly a Zionist representative who’s excited about the death and destruction in Gaza, please don’t have that person on-
00:25:56
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:25:57
Eric Weinstein: … unless they have some governmental reason for being on the show. And if you have some revolutionary, uh, who’s, you know, worried about what’s going on, uh, in, in Gaza, uh, and is excited about, uh, you know, uh, missiles falling, uh, in Israel and, and, and killing civilians, why is that person on? In other words, th- there is still a thing called basic Western values that you represent, that I represent. You and I, I think, have recently disagreed-
00:26:27
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:26:28
Eric Weinstein: … uh, in part about what’s going on in, in, in Israel and Gaza. But my point is, you don’t wanna see a, one extra person die who doesn’t need to on any side. Neither do I, right? And so we may have different ideas about how to accomplish that.
00:26:39
Piers Morgan: No, but I, I think what would concern me is that-
00:26:41
Eric Weinstein: But to pretend that some-
00:26:41
Piers Morgan: Yeah, but what concerns me, Eric, about this, is it’s a slippery slope, isn’t it, into real genuine suppression of free speech? You know, what you’re really saying is that I should operate a much more stringent and draconian anti-free speech policy. I should stop platforming anyone whose views you-
00:27:00
Eric Weinstein: Don’t know
00:27:00
Piers Morgan: … you, Eric, find really offensive. Isn’t that really what you’re saying? And isn’t that actually goes against everything you probably think you stand for about free speech?
00:27:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I’m, I’m a huge free speech addict.
00:27:13
Piers Morgan: Right.
00:27:13
Eric Weinstein: And in part, I wanna make sure that free speech is always about the exchange of ideas.
00:27:20
Piers Morgan: Yeah, but the whole point of free speech-
00:27:21
Eric Weinstein: What I’m trying to say is, is that weapon-
00:27:21
Piers Morgan: … surely is that, uh, the whole point of free speech actually is that unless what somebody says-
00:27:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:27:28
Piers Morgan: … is already illegal, in other words, you are inciting an act of violence or whatever it may be, that actually, you know, hateful speech has to be tolerated. But it seems to me like you don’t want me to have anyone on here who espouses things that you personally find hateful. And I would say that there are plenty of people who might find some things you say hateful. I don’t happen to think so, but there are people. Um, now should they, you know, should I ban you? You know, in other words, w- who deci- in other words-
00:27:57
Eric Weinstein: Maybe
00:27:58
Piers Morgan: … who de- who deci- but-
00:27:58
Eric Weinstein: If you, if you feel that I’m-
00:28:00
Piers Morgan: But who, but I don’t. I don’t.
00:28:01
Eric Weinstein: I, I don’t-
00:28:01
Piers Morgan: I don’t agree with everything on it. But, but who decides?
00:28:03
Eric Weinstein: Piers.
00:28:03
Piers Morgan: Who decides-
00:28:04
Eric Weinstein: Piers
00:28:04
Piers Morgan: … where that line is?
00:28:09
Eric Weinstein: Uh, this is not as hard of a problem as we’re making it out to be. It’s not a question of, well, some people say this, and some people say that. The, th- there are basic concepts about dignity and human empathy and, um, there are violations of them that are very profitable right now, that are the precursors, the painting of targets that lead to what is called direct action. What I’m trying to do is to alert you to something where you, you can s- you can sit there and you can say, look, we have a demarcation problem. Eric, are you not asserting that we need gatekeeper? Well, yes, we, at some level.
00:28:45
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:28:45
Eric Weinstein: Uh, the whole point of free speech is to load gatekeeping on social pressure, not legal pressure.
00:28:53
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:28:53
Eric Weinstein: And the whole point about that is is that I wanna hear from people who have radically different perspectives from my own. Like, radically different.
00:29:02
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:29:03
Eric Weinstein: But I want to hear it in the context of an exchange of ideas rather than as a precursor to revolutionary violence. What I’m trying to get at is that if you wanna get in, you know, into it about free speech, I’ve talked to you pre- previously about-
00:29:17
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:29:17
Eric Weinstein: … physicists don’t have it because of restricted data, or Brandenburg versus Ohio took it away, or Memoirs versus Massachusetts became Miller versus California in pornography. There are so many adjustments to free speech that have to do with the law trying to handle something which we know more or less what is it that is a liberal society. It has to do with the fact that there are so many people with good ideas who represent these various forces, that we, we, we could give all those slots to people who very forcefully advocate for their side, without, without needing to expand this to people who see that the general game, uh, involves, uh, message killing, of sneaking up behind a CEO or, uh, taking a, a long shot at Charlie Kirk, or hiding, uh, in Butler, PA at a, at a Trump rally. I mean, wake up, man. It’s, it’s, it’s not a, it’s not about y- nobody’s portraying me, who’s smart- … as a violent extremist. It’s just, it’s just not true. And what I’m trying to say to you is-
00:30:23
Piers Morgan: No, I didn’t, I didn’t say that
00:30:24
Eric Weinstein: … if you look for the shi-
00:30:24
Piers Morgan: I said there are some people, there, there have been some people who take some of your views, and they think they’re dangerous or extreme. I don’t happen to be one of those people, but they exist. They’re out there.
00:30:34
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:30:34
Piers Morgan: And every time I interview, there’ll be a few popping up on social media saying so, right? So my point being, the only point of me saying that is not because I agree with them. I don’t. I don’t think you’re either of those things. I love having you on. I love arguing with you. Uh, I find it very intellectually stimulating. But it just seems to me slightly perverse-
00:30:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:30:52
Piers Morgan: … that somebody who is so emphatically pro-free speech sounds to me dangerously [laughs] extremist-ly, uh, like he wants to introduce a kind of, uh, a new gatekeeping thing to the show, where the only people who sh- show a bar of empathy that you, Eric Weinstein, find acceptable could then be platformed on the show. And that, that to me is a really dangerous road to go down. Ironically, i- is it, to me, you’re sounding quite dangerous and extremist about how you wanna suppress free speech.
00:31:27
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I find this hysterically funny. Pierce, if you think about it, your, your front door has a lock on it. Are you a gatekeeper? Not everybody can get into this van, uh, in San Francisco, uh, and, and get on your program. You’re gatekeeping every day of your life. This idea that gatekeeping is bad, no. Gatekeeping is essential. We all gatekeep.
00:31:48
Piers Morgan: When it comes to free speech.
00:31:49
Eric Weinstein: All of our lives are gatekept. The problem is the… Again, you’re not, I, I don’t know why we’re, we’re at odds.
00:31:54
Piers Morgan: But I thought you, haven’t you argued against this in-
00:31:56
Eric Weinstein: You can-
00:31:56
Piers Morgan: … in the physics world? Haven’t you said the very thing that’s problematic with the physics world is the gatekeeping by the mainstream orthodoxy? Isn’t that one of your main bugbears about them?
00:32:08
Eric Weinstein: But, I, I, I really, I think it’s as if you’re trying to say gatekeeping good or bad.
00:32:14
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:32:14
Eric Weinstein: It’s like saying water good or bad. If you, if you, if you’re thirsty, water’s great. If you’re hit with an avalanche, you’re gonna die from it, or a tidal wave. You can’t say that gatekeeping is good or bad. The question is the quality of the gates kept.
00:32:26
Piers Morgan: No, but my problem is that you-
00:32:28
Eric Weinstein: In part, um-
00:32:28
Piers Morgan: … it seems to me that you, Eric Weinstein, want to be the gatekeeper. You want to determine whether people’s empathy levels reach your bar-
00:32:36
Eric Weinstein: I have no idea what that is
00:32:36
Piers Morgan: … that warrants them being allowed to be on this show, for example.
00:32:39
Eric Weinstein: I’ll tell you what.
00:32:40
Piers Morgan: And I’m saying, that to me-
00:32:41
Eric Weinstein: Why don’t we just-
00:32:41
Piers Morgan: … actually is a pretty dangerous road to go down, isn’t it?
00:32:47
Eric Weinstein: Pierce, let me ask you a question. You and I have never had a conversation about Charlie Kirk and whether or not I think highly or poorly of him. Am I correct?
00:32:55
Piers Morgan: I, I think that’s right, I, uh-
00:32:55
Eric Weinstein: Do you have any question about… Yeah. Do you have any question about what my reaction is to his murder?
00:33:02
Piers Morgan: Sure.
00:33:02
Eric Weinstein: Emotionally.
00:33:03
Piers Morgan: Sure. What, what is your reaction emotionally?
00:33:05
Eric Weinstein: What’s my reaction?
00:33:07
Piers Morgan: Well-
00:33:07
Eric Weinstein: You tell me. Do you think I’m excited about it?
00:33:09
Piers Morgan: No.
00:33:12
Eric Weinstein: I know you’re not excited about it, and I’ve never heard your reaction, because we’re both part of normal societal reality.
00:33:18
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:33:19
Eric Weinstein: What we’re talking about is so shifted. I can assume all sorts of things. You know, I, I speak a little Turkish. I didn’t sit down in this van expecting that maybe we were gonna do this in Turkish or Russian-
00:33:30
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:33:30
Eric Weinstein: … or some other language that I fumble in. I assumed it was going to be English. We make assumptions about each other and ourselves and our society every day.
00:33:38
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:33:39
Eric Weinstein: And as a result of that, what I’m trying to say is this revolutionary thing, I don’t want to prohibit it at the level of speech at all. But I wanna say, we, we, if we cannot say that people celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk are dangerously shifted from the rest of society, that it has a central core, and that we are absolutely not embarrassed-
00:34:01
Piers Morgan: But I would only have those people on-
00:34:03
Eric Weinstein: … about this Judeo-Christian substrate-
00:34:04
Piers Morgan: I, I would only have those people on if they had expressed that view-
00:34:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:34:08
Piers Morgan: … and wanted to come on the show, and I could rip them to pieces for their inhumanity. And the reason I would do that would be if they were already getting a lot of traction without being challenged, because I see my job to challenge that kind of thing and to expose it. Now, y- you know, you would probably not agree with me doing that, because they so obviously lack empathy. But I want to expose that lack of empathy. I want most people to watch the exchanges I have with these people in that eventuality and think, “Good on you, Pierce, for showing the world what this person really is,” rather than giving them a free run on social media where they may not, you know, get any pushback at all from their own echo chamber.
00:34:49
Eric Weinstein: Y- you know, Pierce, I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard a song called Look at Your Game, Girl. It’s an u- unbelievably beautiful song recorded during the 1960s-
00:34:57
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:34:57
Eric Weinstein: … by a recording artist named Charles Manson, uh, who went on to brutally murder a group of people.
00:35:04
Piers Morgan: Mm. Mm.
00:35:04
Eric Weinstein: Uh, it’s a sensitive, beautiful song. Now, my claim is that we have a discomfort about this, because when, depending upon where we sample a person, we might find that they’re, you know, semi-empathic, not completely empathic. I’m not telling you what you can and cannot do. I’m trying to say that you and I inherited a concept of mustn’t. You know? On different, on different continents, we, we weren’t, we didn’t grow up in the same place. We’re part of a shared Judeo-Christian substrate, which I am unambiguously in favor of.
00:35:35
Piers Morgan: Mm.
00:35:35
Eric Weinstein: You know? And the whole idea is that our free speech and our freedom has to do with the fact that we are a highly disciplined, moral people. Even when we transgress morality, and we all do, I’m guilty of it as are you, we know at some level that we’ve transgressed. And this idea of celebrating the transgression and deciding that we are gonna shift all of society into an illiberal framework, and that that is going to then require incredibly illiberal means to reverse. Uh, I’m trying to say, look, we can do that. If what we wanna do is explore the concept that free speech and freedom and e- relativism and who’s to say and we don’t want gatekeeping and all that stuff, prepare for an infinite slide into the trough.
00:36:20
Piers Morgan: Okay, well, here’s-
00:36:21
Eric Weinstein: What I’m trying to say is-
00:36:21
Piers Morgan: … here’s how I’m gonna-
00:36:21
Eric Weinstein: … that wasn’t what made-
00:36:23
Piers Morgan: Okay, I hear you, but here’s how I’m gonna end this, ’cause we, we’ve r- run out of time. I’m gonna get my team to send you a list of every guest we’ve had on this year, and I want you to tell them, before we speak again, who I shouldn’t have platformed Deal?
00:36:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, sorry, and then, then, then what? You talk about this or-
00:36:43
Piers Morgan: Yeah
00:36:44
Eric Weinstein: … I’m the gatekeeper?
00:36:44
Piers Morgan: We, then we have a really gen-
00:36:46
Eric Weinstein: Don’t set me up for that
00:36:46
Piers Morgan: … we have a really fas-
00:36:47
Eric Weinstein: I’m not the… I’m not your gate-
00:36:49
Piers Morgan: No, but you are suggesting-
00:36:50
Eric Weinstein: You, you do your-
00:36:50
Piers Morgan: … you’re suggesting I need one, and you’re suggesting a criteria, which is based around values and empathy and so on. I’m saying that is-
00:36:58
Eric Weinstein: Piers, let me explain what-
00:36:58
Piers Morgan: I’m saying that’s a suppression of free speech-
00:37:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:37:01
Piers Morgan: … and because actually somebody has to determine what those values are and what the level of empathy is. And so I think it’d be really interesting for me-
00:37:08
Eric Weinstein: And Piers-
00:37:08
Piers Morgan: … rather than talking, like, in generalized terms, who are we talking about that you think I’ve platformed-
00:37:14
Eric Weinstein: Piers
00:37:14
Piers Morgan: … which is wrong-
00:37:16
Eric Weinstein: Piers
00:37:16
Piers Morgan: … and we can have a debate.
00:37:17
Eric Weinstein: Piers. Look, I, I… No, w- what I keep trying to tell you is I don’t want these people following us after your show-
00:37:27
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:37:27
Eric Weinstein: … into our lives-
00:37:28
Piers Morgan: I understand
00:37:28
Eric Weinstein: … calling our friends-
00:37:30
Piers Morgan: I understand that
00:37:30
Eric Weinstein: … our loved ones-
00:37:31
Piers Morgan: Yeah
00:37:31
Eric Weinstein: … publishing our a- Yes, what I’m trying to say is some of the people you’ve had on are part of that complex and trying to draw me into a specific conversation with people who are very interested in acting as the shooter did at Charlie Kirk’s-
00:37:46
Piers Morgan: Mm
00:37:46
Eric Weinstein: … as the shooter did at Butler, Pennsylvania. What you’re doing is you’re trying to say, “Come on, man. Let’s have some free speech. Let’s have some fun. Let’s be open and free spirited and talk about people with whom we disagree. Surely there’s no gatekeeper.” What I’m trying to say is this show isn’t as important enough to me that I want to endanger my family and myself playing these games. We know what morality is. We know that this is far outside it, and if you wanna play with those people because you think that those are interesting ideas, that’s up to you. I’m not gonna interfere with your free speech. I’m not-
00:38:20
Piers Morgan: Eric, Eric
00:38:20
Eric Weinstein: … your gatekeeper, and as always, I love talking to you.
00:38:23
Piers Morgan: Well-
00:38:23
Eric Weinstein: Thanks very much having, for having me on, Piers
00:38:25
Piers Morgan: … I love talking to you, and I simply have one word I will repeat, which I would love to have answered next time, which is who. Who are you talking about? Anyway, Eric, we’re gonna leave it there. I really appreciate you coming on. It’s a fascinating-
00:38:36
Eric Weinstein: Great to see you, Piers
00:38:36
Piers Morgan: … conversation, and maybe we’ll find out. Thank you very much.
00:38:41
Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me.
00:38:42
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